We call it Good Friday. Our tradition is one of celebration of Good Friday for what Christ willingly accomplished for our benefit. 2000 years ago it was not a Good Friday at all.
2000 years ago it was a perfect picture of Proverbs 13:12 “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.”
Imagine being a follower of Christ on ” Good Friday” 2000 years ago. Imagine you have spent the last few years of your life walking with this man Jesus every day. Listening to His teaching, experiencing His love and compassion, experiencing His miraculous ministry touching the lives of people.
Imagine you mothers out there: today you will watch your son be nailed to a cross, mocked and abused and left to die… while you watch helplessly and powerless.
You have believed and followed this man Jesus and have been waiting for Him to usher in his kingdom like the prophecies foretold, waiting for Him to overthrow the captivity of the people of God and re-establish the nation of Israel under His leadership. But Jesus did not come as a conquering King to overthrow the nations and establish His reign, He came… as a suffering servant.
You watch as your son, your brother, your friend, your Messiah, your Lord hangs there on that cross. To you, hope is not deferred, Hope is dying right there in front of you. Because your hope was in your expectancy of what was to come, your hope wasn’t in the One who had come.
For many people today hope is dying or even has died. Many I think can relate to how it must have felt to watch your hope die right in front of you because there are places in your life right now where you have hoped and you have felt hopeless. There are places you have placed an expectancy of a certain outcome and that outcome has not come in the way you thought it should so you feel hopeless.
There was in that day so much hope being released to the world and yet no one could recognize it. Good Friday for us, because we know what comes next, we celebrate hope. But for many today they stand before the cross as hopeless as those who stood there 2000 years ago.
Psalm 42:11 “Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; For I shall yet praise Him, The help of my countenance and my God.”
Today would you not place your hope in the expectancy of an outcome, but rather place your hope in THE Hope Giver and simply trust the outcome to Him? I pray this Easter hope finds you, hope restores you and hope replaces your expectancy with the hope giver, Jesus Christ.
Join us this Sunday morning @ The Church at Pleasant Ridge as we celebrate hope, as we celebrate the hope giver, as we celebrate the glorious Resurrection!